/lit/ - Literature

He's supposed to represent The Man

The ultimate evil. But at the same time, just and asshole.

>>13372166
None of the fan art i've seen of the judge represents how hes described in the book. He's supposed to look like a giant hairless infant with a serene look. I always imagined statuesque round face that made him look otherwordly. He's also likened to an icon and a djin in the book. But all art has him as either a haggard generic bald man or a DUDE IM SO CRAZYYY joker type character.

>>13372225
THIS is your Judge

>>13372225
I imagined Jeffrey Tambor for some reason

>>13372225
>>13372497
John Goodman was the only decent cast and that is long gone by now

>>13372503
Ed Kemper would unironically be the perfect Judge Holden
>6'9"
>145 IQ
>very calm
>violent
hes the real life version. too bad he wasnt around in 1850

Ultimate evil in the American west, that’s why at the end they say he’s immortal, you can never get rid of evil.

What if we kissed in the jakes.....

>>13372550
He was also kind of babyfaced. You're right, perfect.

>>13372550
Come clean my roof you monster. Your giant body will never fit in Washington, DC.

I think he was meant to represent the evil that lies within man. A lot of McCarthy's work kind of wrestles with reconciling the theist's existence of order, where things are deserved and what comes up must come down, against a universe of random chaos that has no apparent cause or reason as to why or how it falls upon the people in it. The judge encapsulates this idea very well because on one hand, there's a shit ton of little signposts that would point to him being the archetypal devil, there's a scene in the book that's lifted straight out of paradise lost, the gunpowder scene, with the judge in the place of lucifer to support this claim. On the other hand, all of the acts of carnage exhibited in the novel are based off of true, historical events, unimaginable cruelty perpetrated by real people.
So I guess you can kind of think of the judge as a spiritual dowsing rod for how the reader fundamentally sees the world because maybe some people feel the need to cast him as the devil because they have difficulty accepting that people are capable of such acts.

>>13374152
very well said. i remember reading one argument saying that hes individualism taken to its most extreme. a sort of solipsistic mania, but your argument is better tbqh

Blood Meridian was originally titled Alien v Predator: Blood Meridian and was intended to be a 4 part comic book series. The Judge was to be an Engineer.